Flow My Tears The Policeman Said

Premiere: June 18-30, 1985
Boston Shakespeare Theater

Written by Philip K. Dick
Adapted by Linda Hartinian
Directed by Bill Raymond

“…a challenging labyrinthine journey…the adaptation is never less than intriguing. The production is heightened by the visual imagery. In a final striking touch, the text is projected on a screen, enlarged and then blurred into Pointillist patterns, through which pass the actors. Words and characters symbolically merge until, in this eerie space-time continuum, it is impossible to differentiate one from the other.”
-Mel Gussow, NY Times

The Boston Phoenix quotes Linda Hartinian in an interview before the play opened: “He (Philip K. Dick) was someone I admired and looked up to, and I knew he had always wanted one of his works to be adapted. One day when I came to visit him he jumped up and grabbed this manuscript and said ‘I want to give you something, but I don’t have anything, so I’m going to give you this manuscript, and someday its gonna be worth a lot of money.'” The Phoenix continues, “It was a draft of Flow My Tears, and as Hartinian discovered when she sat down to adapt the book, it contained many passages that had been cut from the published text, including a discussion of ways to remember deceased writers that was to prove prescient. Naturally Hartinian based her script on her private edition.”
The play was directed by Bill Raymond. “It was in response to Linda’s loss that we chose Tears,” he told the Phoenix, “because Flow My Tears is in fact a novel about grief, and not necessarily just about loss of identity.”